4 more pumpkins!

Painted these orange w/highlights then blackwashed them with watered down black paint. I'm going to try painting them black and orangewashing them next time. ;~D

She's Monday!!! And she's done!!!

Monday has arrived. My monster is done and now resides on my desk at work. My next project will be a rainbow monster for a friend of mine and one Pack Guar which is a character from the game Morrowind created by Bethesda.

My Monster Monday

This is Monday, as my friend Pat says:
Monday is a pretty scary name... It gives the sense of impending doom and the start of something that will suck the life out of you for the next 5 days... ;o)



Then my friend Tyler wrote her a little poem.


Ms. Monday Beatrice Frost
had 10 fingers, but 2 got lost
With eyes of yellow
and her staff of power
Her weeks became mellow
...and a little less sour.

She came from a village
fraught with peril and danger
With neighbors came pillage
her village became stranger

She went to the tree
of wisdom and lore
Wisdom she did see
against all the gore

She asked for help
from the tree of the wise
She was just a whelp
too old to despise

Tree reached out
and took her deep within
She wanted to shout
but knew that a sin

"One day" the said
"another will recreate you
not out of needle and thread
but of paper and glue"

Awesome! I'm going to try to paint her tonight. I said I would last night, but my workout took longer than I expected.

I bought a book by Dan Reeder from Amazon a few weeks ago called Paper Mache Monster Turn trinkets & trash into magnificent monstrosities. I love hideous ugly things, so I thought I'd make my first monster. You should check out his blog. It's most excellent. And while your at it, another amazing paper mache artist is Scott Stoll. Check out his Stolloween site. Scott makes the most amazing Halloween props I've ever seen.

Paper Mache pumpkins

Working on my Halloween decorations. Almost done with 2 pumpkins, the big one is Johnny Rotten Pumpkin seed and the small one is Mr. Bill Gourd.

One note to myself, make the arms seperate from the actual pumpkin and make them detachable. He's freaking heavy and cumbersome to take outside for drying. Not to mention, his arms collapse from the damp clay.

Now I need to figure out how to make fake pumpkins guts for Johnny's mouth.

Slackware and wireless networking

This is something I've been afraid of for a long time. The thought of setting up wireless in Slackware used to make me shudder. Well, on Black Friday I decided to peruse the internet for a cheap PCMCIA wireless network card that "Works in Linux" and I found one on amazon.com for just under 9 bucks. Yes, you read that right. Nine bucks. I also picked up a Belken wireless G universal range extender and my card is a D-Link G650 card.

I had troubles at first. I tried the madwifi drivers and for some reason I could not get it to work.
Madwifi wanted ath0 as the net name, and would for some reason add wifi0 which is a virtual device to my ifconfig list. That didn't work at all. The software compiled fine, installed ok, loaded up the drivers like it was supposed to, but for some reason, must have been something I was putting in the config files in /etc/rc.d that made it not work right.

So I popped in the CD with the net drivers and copied over the net5211.inf and the two .sys files from /Drivers on the CD. I ran ndiswrapper:
ndisrapper -i net5211.inf
ndiswrapper -l
ndiswrapper -ma
ndiswrapper -mi
and did an insmod ndiswrapper to load the module.
The tricky part was figuring out the config files in /etc/rc.d/
rc.inet1.conf
rc.wireless.conf
I finally figured out, after hours of screwing with it, that these lines:

## Pick up any Access Point, should work on most 802.11 cards
*)
INFO="Any ESSID"
ESSID="any"
;;
## ---------- END SECTION TO REMOVE ------------

Need to remain uncommented just like above in rc.wireless.conf

I added wlan0 into rc.inet1.conf and it worked! Now my network is a little strange. I have everything wired, running into my DSL modem except for my Mom's laptop in her house (same property, seperate houses). She has a net cable running into a wireless hub, and my repeater just connected to the hub at her place with no troubles at all. I'm typing this on my laptop using wireless! I can now take my laptop anywhere in the house or yard and use my computer.

Viva Slackware!!!!

Operatika - The Calling

I'm a big fan of Symphonic Metal. I love bands like Nightwish, After Forever, Epica and Within Tempation so when I heard about Operatika I figured I give them a listen.

The members are:
Vocals: Slava Popova
Guitars: Bill Visser
Keyboards: Anna
Drums: Yuri Liakhovitch
Bass: tba

When a genre of music becomes popular due to several very good bands, bands that sound very similar come crawling out the the woodwork. Operatika is one of those woodwork crawling bands. I don't dislike their music, but there's nothing new and exciting with this band. The guitarist loves his sweep arpeggios, uses them to boredom in his solos. Their vocalist is good, she has a very nice voice, but the female opera vocals have been overdone. The music is average at best, they're a "been there, done that" type of band.

The track listing for "The Calling" is as follows:
1. Intro
2. Gladiator
3. Tears Of The Sun
4. Dark Horizon
5. Ice Queen
6. Life Saving Flame
7. No. 3/23 In A Minor
8. Mask In The Mirror
9. Secrets Of The Past
10. The Storm
11. The Calling
12. Last Quest

Life saving flame is the best track on the album IMO but it's still under par. The instrumental No. 3/23 in A Minor sounds like a blatant Yngwie Malmsteen rip.

If you are looking for good Symphonic Metal, pass on this one. Check out the other bands that I mentioned earlier or check out Symphony X.

Century Media Podcast for November 2008

Century Media Podcast for November 2008

I love this podcast. Very little talk and a lot of great music.

Host Tim Binder

1. The Haunted - Moronic Colossus
Great tune, The vocalist, though he's a growler/screamer, mixes up his vocals enough to make them interesting. The guitarist(s) are top notch, they don't over or underplay. Good song, I'm going to get more to listen to.

2. Cursed - 1917
Starts off very mellow for the verse then picks up a little for the chorus. The vocals are pretty good, he sings in a non-english language. I'd have to hear more from the band, this song doesn't grab me the way the first one did, but it's pretty good.

3. Poison Black - Left Behind
This is a pretty perky song, interesting vocals from what I can tell, although they're a little buried in the mix especially in the chorus. Good arrangement and orchestration.

4. Duff McKagan - No More
Verse Reminds me a little of The Stray Cats has a swing feel to it, very 80s sounding. The bridge at the end was the best part of the song. The verse get's a little monotonous after a few times through.


5. ????? - ????? (couldn't understand the band or song name can anyone clarify?)
Not thrilled with this song, female vocalist, power metal-ish with a celtic twist. The vocals are irritating, she doesn't have a full voice like Tarja, it's thin and sort of shrill. The death/growl vocals in the middle are better.

6. Helheim - Det Norrøne Alter
A Dimmu style dark, slow song with viking/black style vocals. I like this band a lot, I'm definately going to pick up one of their CDs. The chorus (?) is very well orchestrated, very church-ish souding. with an organ at the end, fantastic musicianship, great arrangement.

Erik the Viking's Top 5

7. Lacuna Coil - Heaven's Alive
I've always loved this band. Christina has a great voice, fits the music to a tee. They're a dark, dreamy, atmospheric, gothic sort of band. They have two vocalists, Andrea (male) and Christina. They mix up the different vocal styles well. This is a fantastic song, one of my favorites by them. They're coming out with a DVD soon called Visual Karma. Pick it up and grab a few of their CDs.

8. Candlemass - Lucifer Rising
These guys have been around a long time. Straight up metal, very old school. Good song, I like the vocalist, great set of pipes and great range.

9. Enslaved - The Watcher
Interesting song. The verse is very viking/black like, then the chorus breaks into clean layered vocals with a very haunting melody, very beautiful actually.

10. Burning the Masses - Gerascophobia
This song would make a great pit song. Very in your face, then backs off. I like the time changes, gives a good jerky effect to the song. guitarist is very good, very quirky style.

On the record - Stu from Into Eternity discusses their new album. The Incurable Tragedy

11. Into Eternity - Diagnosis Terminal
I love this band, seen them live twice, very quirky, twisted band. Thier new album "The Incurable Tragedy" is fantastic. They mix up the time changes, stops & starts with growling vocals and beautiful harmonies. If you're looking for a band that's really different, I highly recommend Into Eternity.

12. Turisas - To Holmgard And Beyond
Very good power/prog metal. The middle of the song reminds me of a soundtrack for an RPG game.
Excellent harmonies, seems to tell a story.

13. In this Moment - Forever
Female vocalist, she has pretty good power, nice vocal melody. I like the guitar melody line in the song, very catchy. this song was written to be played on the radio, very catchy and commercial.

14. Stick to your guns - Part of me
Not my cup of tea, devoid of any melody, and the riffs aren't all that interesting. The vocalist is the typical shouter. Nothing original here. Mercifully, the song was short.